April’s fool or not? ASP.NET MVC source released under MS-PL

I’m excited today to announce that we are also releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.

Codeplex license is not updated yet, but at this point I guess ASP.NET MVC deserves a project of its own as the asp.net codeplex project contains all asp.net pre-release stuff and only one license is allowed per project (thank to Phil for explaining this in the comments) : if this is real effort, they should start managing it as a real opensource project, with public issue tracking, public changeset list, and maybe even contribution from external developers.

The proof that this is not an April’s fool is the AspNetMvc1.Ms-PL.source.zip file that is available for download on Microsoft site: it really contains the MS-PL license. The source under MS-PL is only the system.web.mvc assembly, not the routing that is part of .NET 3.5 SP1 neither the abstractions' one.

I’m really excited to see this happening, seeing a Microsoft product released as OpenSource. Ok, it already happened with the Silverlight Control Toolkit and the Ajax Control Toolkit, but this is a “main stream” library, not just a pack with some controls (please Justin, don’t kill me now).

ASP.NET MVC is a newly released library for building web applications, and lots of contents is available on the web and will be available on book stores. I’m taking part of this evangelization effort both giving talks and writing a book: Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0, that I’m writing with Keyvan and that will be published in the June/July timeframe by Wrox (but it’s already available for pre-order on Amazon if you want to make sure they don’t run out of copies)

To honor this announcements, tomorrow evening, after my workshop about ASP.NET MVC, we will go and party with some glasses of good wine. Cheers!!!